I’ve been using Motion on and off for more than a year now and I’ve only just discovered this little quirk with text rendering - Point Size Affects Text Filters Quality.
When laying out text in a project I normally type the text using the text tool at something like 10pt and scale it up to the size that I think looks good. This works fine and looks great but as soon as you add a filter things can go wonky. It appears that when you scale up text using the distort nodes it doesn’t change the point size so filters are applied as if the text is still 10pt or whatever point you started at. So what does this mean? Basically the text changes from lovely clean vector shapes to ugly blocky bitmaps. Check out my example:
Both Elephant text is the same text but the first one is scaled up and the second one is scaled down.. notice the bloom effect (with default settings) create a very different result!!
So what is the lesson learnt from all this? Don’t scale up text using the nodes.. scale text using its point size and you will have sharp looking effects text all the time!!! … unless of course you want blocky pixelated effects???
Published at January 19, 2007
in Video.
I was just informed of a new open source project call SMSG (Simple Menucoder Shell GUI) that a friend from UNI has been working on. I won’t try and explain what it does because Matho has done such a great job himself:
“Usage primarily as a batch video trans-coding application without all the tabs, buttons and crap that frustrated the shizen out of me with other applications that hook into the mencoder executable.”
I’m looking forward to future updates as this looks very promising!
check it out here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/smsg/
Published at September 8, 2006
in Video.
Monday was a bizarre day for me. I’ve never met Steve Irwin and I never really watched his show. I remember parts of his movie but not much. Still, I felt like I had lost a mate. I dunno why? He was always so over the top, so excited and so full on. One thing is for sure tho - he new how to do something and he knew how to do it well. Steve was brilliant at marketing and I take my hat off to him.
One of the other bizarre things about Steve’s death was that on Sunday the day before, we ran a fathers day special video at church that was taking off Steve, and his antics. I’ve been tossing up wether or not to upload it and I thought the best option would be to dedicate it to Steve.
So here we go: Presenting the “Fathers Day 2006″ special video dedicated to the late Steve Irwin.
Steve, you deserve legend status.
*UPDATED* - I was asked to removed the kids so enjoy the updated version.
**DIGG THIS POST**
Published at September 7, 2006
in Video.
A couple of months ago I was asked to do a promo video for an event that was going to be running at church (at our highpoint location). This video was running at lifecc.com.au for a little while but I took it down after the event had finished. I thought I would wack it up here as it was one of my first HDV edits.
